Science

December 10, 2012

The vision for "small drones", or Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) needs to be much bigger - because it's impact is much bigger. It will affect every single person in the United States.

Some might say, "well that proves the point that the FAA needs to regulate it...like manned aviation!"

I disagree strongly.

I believe that this is the equivelent of a good old fashioned Gold Rush.

The bad news is that there is an arbitrage of information that could marginalize the opportunity this industry represents and that's a shame.

The good news, however, is that there truly can be room for everyone to prosper if this industry is allowed to form and become healthy.

Why?

Because the means for this industry is access to the airspace over our heads. Yep, it's simply the air we breathe all around us - and there's lots of it and it's not just concentrated in hard to reach rural or wealthy metro area's or controlled by one group and that to me is revolutionary and holds tremendous promise for our country and shouldn't be diminished or marginalized.

Here's what I mean:

Lots of people involved in small unmanned aerial systems (SUAS) believe that the unmanned systems are solving the problem of flying a small $xxx dollar camera around by flying it around on an $xxx,xxx small unmanned system - which is absolutely false and ridiculous.

When you think about it though, you might be able to understand why this "background of obviousness" might exist. Think about it this way.

Manned Aviation primarily solve the logistical problem of moving things around that are physical and have mass such as people and stuff.

Someday (whenever that actual day is is to be determined) an SUAS (Small Unmanned Aerial System) aka "small drone" end user will be qualified to operate said equipment by the the original equipment manufacturer and granted permission to operate the equipment by the FAA while he or she provide's a (in this instance public service) to the community and is paid a salary by said community to operate said equipment as a course of their professional duties. (In this instance) This equipment was purchased through public funds (be they local taxes, debt instruments, state / federal grants, or some blend thereof) from an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or a reputable reseller and accordingly has been certified / approved for use by the FAA and requisite to this the equipment will adhere to some type of manufacturing and airworthiness standard in a way that is acceptable by the aviation industry and Federal, state and local regulatory agencies.

OK. First of all I am not going to go into the existing "band aid" workarounds that are in place to give military suas tech or first responders "emergency access" to the National Airspace System (NAS). This is not scalable and clearly untenable for the existince of a large commercial market. It's a stop gap measure.

My intent is to squarely focus on a truly accessible commercial SUAS market and the point is that if the FAA centric approach to SUAS NAS integration were to become the de facto policy the individual's and their local level municipalities ("communities") themselves are essentially left out of the opportunity for each to become a stakeholder (and participate in some way) for the sake of economic development, etc...

And why is that?

The FAA centric approach to SUAS NAS integration is what amounts to be a form of "imminent domain". And it's a tightly held and secretive process conducted behind closed doors with very little if any local municipal involvement.

Think about it this way, If an oil & gas operator or telecommunications provider wanted temporary, semi-permenant or permanent access to space in a community they'd have to provide compensaton or at least be granted permission, correct? There are processes in place today for this to happen, so why should operating SUAS equipment be any different?

Why is it that the "de facto" approach is through the FAA? The technology in question are small unmanned aerial systems - FYI, there are still questions as to what defines "small" - is it smaller than a "grey goose?" or something else? The thinking is that if a 25lb grey goose flies freely in the sky (without asking for permssion), can't a small drone with appropriate failsafes, trained operator, certification, etc... that weighs less than 25lbs operate safely as well?

Is it truly best for the American people that a Federal Agency grants permission (and access) to commercial or government entities to operate manned aviation to be the exact same organization responsible for regulating and granting permssion for small high tech products to operate as well? Or is this biased thinking based on archaic, legacy systems and technology that quite frankly is impeding progress and advancement of this industry.

Are we the American people to also accept that this same agency will then grant permission for commercial and government agencies to operate/employ (or purchase services through said commercial service provider) - over every inch of our nation - an in no small part over low resource density communities which will then effectively eliminate or bypass the specific community's (or individual's) opportunity to benefit financially in any form?

Seems to me like this business model has an imbalanced economic incentive and that's no good for anybody in the long run.

Rooted deeply in every human being's brainstem is the hardwiring to respond to incentives. So, where is the incentive for local municipalities ("communities")? Seems to me they are seen as sources of revenue as customers, end users and beneficiaries of the capabilities, but they aren't seen as someone to be included in the process (or even the product sale or service transaction). Again I ask why?

I am of the opinion that this is an incentive that needs to be explored and not simply dismissed or ignored. Especially since on the one hand the production and manufacturing of these SUAS products or the delivery of such services will likely be based, concentrated or clustered in certain area's with high resource densities of academic, science, technology and engineering resources as well as access to federal/military requirements, decisionmakers and the associated funds - while on the other hand, this equipment will be used in (ostensibly) every area and quite possibly with the highest demand in those area's with the lowest resource densities.

The point I'm making is that the existing and proposed processes and policies produce an economic incentive and benefit that is too concentrated (unbalanced) and in the hands of too few right now and needs to be extended, expanded and rebalanced.

Solution:

AT LEAST ONE TEST SITE IN EVERY STATE SHOULD BE THE MINIMUM. Period. And that's only the beginning wth an eventual goal (with ambitious timetables and economic diversity objectives) to blanket every inch of US soil to be made available for safe commercial (and consumer) SUAS activities and flight operations. This industry growth or accessibility shouldn't be limited or predicated by the ability of the FAA to staff airspace managers to be doling out COA's (certificate of authorization WAIVER's). There shouldn't be a waiver - it should become status quo - not an exemption based process.

I believe that in addition to the other already involved constituencies that the FCC and telecom industry (and eventually consumer tech industry) needs to be better involved and included in understanding and helping in the development and building the requisite "infrastructure" and even lend a hand in considering alternative business models and other incentives that truly enable this industry to become healthy and prosperous and all inclusive - as well because they have learned critical and important lessons in building their own industry's (in conjunction with federal regulators) infrastructure in every US community and they have developed the systems, processes and the means to effect the emergence and growth of this industry. (i.e. radio spectrum - vis a vis "airspace") Why can't our industry look to them for advice, lessons learned, etc.. for truly enabling the emergence and growth of a large, healthy and open SUAS industry that becomes something truly substantial and directly beneficial to all involved.

Why should and since when did SUAS tech get a pass from these issues, concerns and most importantly opportunities?

In October 2010 I attended a conference in San Diego, CA and publicly advised the AUVSI representative on one of the panel's that this was thin ice for AUVSI and that the organization needed to be very careful in how it promotes the "promise" of a free and open national airspace system. My comments were received well by some and I was even invited to speak at a few meetings post conference, however the sense that I got from others was that I was "making waves" or "rocking the boat" and not contributing to the overall effort to produce "feel good narratives that promote interest and involvement" and to continue to find ways to foster cooperation with the FAA, which was believed to be needed at the time.

I was essentially cautioning the group that this was a dangerous trap and that full disclosure to anyone considering an attempt to enter this nascent space was the only credible course of action forward for the association as a whole. In other words, any industry or association representative must ensure that:

Fidelity in their messaging that all is not well and their is danger ahead and no guarantee that the market will open in a timely fashion.

This must be fully disclosed and also discussed in these conferences to equip attendee's with the bottom line information so they can plan accordingly and not end up surprised or devastated at some point when they realize how difficult it truly will be for them to bring their products or technologies to market.

This industry group has decided on behalf of its membership to yield to the authority of the FAA as the manned aviation regulator to then grant them by default unmanned aviation proponency.

That the consequences of taking this position mean that the possibility of accessing paying customers in the US commercial market is in the hands of a regulating body who views unmanned aviation with suspicion, as a niche industry, and as a very low priority.

Fast forward to today...

I'm sure there's alot of "gnashing of teeth", shock, frustration and quite possibly even fear - right now about the latest reality check vis a vis the FAA decision to suspend site selection for UAS airspace integration. I get it and feel for the inventor or entrepeuner or small business owner betting that this market will have opened to them by now. As one of the early early contributors of SUAS tech in the US Military and Special Operations and Naval Special Warfare communities, all I could do was sigh and shake my head in amazement at the bizarre display of how devastating groupthink can be. The Unmanned System caucus is the latest case in point.

This was a predictable scenario because the present vision for the SUAS commercial market is way too small relative to it's actual impact and promise which is much too large for one constituency or group to control and here are just a few key distortion field and reality check talking points that need to be carefully considered as this industry evolves and (I hope) eventually gets it's footing.

Distortion vs. Reality (Part One)

1. Guarantee'd certainty Distortion: Investors and business love predictability. They thrive when they have it and fall apart when they don't have it (or realize they never did have the sure fire where, when, who, how much and how long answer). This has put pressure on those in the SUAS industry to establish timetables for commercial market revenue generation which has been wildly optimistic and is frankly one of the primary enablers for the disfunctional state of such a young and still forming industry. Rushing to show that as the wars draw down and defense spending cuts take hold the commercial market opportunity will "take up some slack" is simply wishful thinking and unfortunately a narrative that many investors (and analysts) have bought into based on the naive notion that they can exploit the existing information and access arbitrage much like they do with other successful investment decisions they make - except it's not working in this instance...

Reality Check: While it sounds great and provides an enticing narrative for selling, Basing the emergence and availability of the SUAS industry on effective and successful transition of SUAS military technology into domestic and commercial applications while carefully addressing all constitutional concerns AND tasking a federal agency (the FAA) with an additional and frankly lower priority task (key point is that the FAA is focused on Manned aviation first and always will be - as they should be) to serve as the proverbial "gatekeeper" and then produce a core standardized policy to enable a commercial SUAS market is a daunting challenge and rife with risk and is not a guarantee'd strategy for success.

In my humble opinion, I believe this effort and opportunity is akin to organizing and inventing systems and processes to put a man on the moon and it needs to be taken just as seriously because it can have the same kind of economic benefit to our nation as it should.

No matter how much pressure is applied this industry cannot be created and opened by attempting to eliminate every risk, providing guarantee's for profitable business creation, imposing the will of a few through political access, changing the color of something, or adjusting the product/service bill of materials therebye developing an alternative pricing scheme.

This effort requires MUCH MORE creativity, imagination and effort in the form of thoughtful and rigorous debate, discussion, analysis and action from every constiutency to include innovators, small business owners, entrepeuners, small, medium and large manufacturers, service providers, regulators, policy makers, end users, customers, private citizens and privacy advocates and most importantly local municipalities ("communities"). How many times must we as American's learn and relearn the same lesson: That it's always best to buy and build and stay local. Enabling local communities to participate is not just happy talk - it's crucial.

KEY POINT: This isn't a matter of "selling" people on spreadsheets and business cases about end unit sales forecasts and manufacturing jobs creation (which are important - but must be beneficial to most and not just a few). If left to the existing proposed path will produce infighting between states for the economic development opportunity of these actual manufacturing activities - which will as a result of the proposed "six site plan" end up concentrating/coalescing around these "magical" places.

I'm all for competition and free markets - however the existing proposed approach is NOT THAT and gives too much power to too few creating a dramatic imbalance resulting in a SCARCITY (FEAR) Based strategy - "there won't be enough" thinking - which limits and restricts imaginative thinking of many many smart, innovative and capable people in the United States and what we end up with instead of growth, health and prosperity is a small, niche and disfunctional industry.

2. "Trust us" Distortion: "Trust us we know what we're doing because we've been doing it with manned aviation for decades."

Reality Check: Not one group or technology provider or organization or regulator or policy maker or privacy advocate has all of the answers about developing a true commercial industry, and therefore by it's very nature huge uncertainty as to when, how and where this market can and will emerge remain. Saying (or believing) anything else is not only poor taste but bad optics and downright dangerous and to draw parallels between a small unmanned aircraft and a manned aircraft is plain and simply put - crazy.

3. "It's a chicken and egg technology problem" distortion: Many in this industry and the FAA believe if they could just build (and control) the right sense and avoid "magic pill" technology that everything else will fall into place and the skies will be safe and open for business.

Reality Check: NAS integration shouldn't become the "technology/product looking for the problem/market entry point". Every problem isn't solved by a "magic product" - and in the case of the lack of a coherent SUAS commercial industry - it's blatantly obvious to most observers that this is not about a single technology and more and more of a people problem and that the lack of National Airspace System (NAS) integration is a great case study of this point and to ignore this will simply prolong the limited size and scope of this market and that confronting this systemic groupthink can allow for the establishment of a large, healthy and vibrant commercial and (my greatest hope - consumer market) for SUAS technologies, products and services.

4. "Existing business models and business processes will work" Distortion: This belief is that once permission to access the NAS is granted (I and many other's are still fuzzy on who gets permission and how and when and where they get this permission and how long this permission will last) that business will boom through product and services sales and communities will embrace the technology whizzing around their heads because of all of the opportunity that will be created.

Reality Check: Although we're still in the "horse and buggy" stages attempting to overlay a manned aviation process is also disturbingly unimaginative as is simply hiding under a rock or ignoring these issues. Additionally, because people respond to incentives there is a huge incentive imbalance between the FAA, technology industry and private citizens that is the largest single roadblock to a true widespread adoption curve for these kinds of technologies and must be addressed in a coherent and inclusion fashion. If this can be effected quickly then that's even better, however all stake holders (witting and unwitting) must be included.

5. "Just increase pressure and it'll get done" Distortion: The FAA centric proposed "six site plan" is good for American interests and will benefit all and we'll decide how and when and which states this will initially occur in private. But it'll be good for everyone. Don't worry about it. Let's just get this pushed through.

Reality Check: If this were the case then why are the actual "Six Sites" being selected in secret? Who's involved in selecting them? Why only six? Where are they? Who gets to make this decision? This should be a completely public and transparent process that isn't conducted in secrecy and is representative of the American people and not a monopolistic pooling of power, information and access.

Therefore, the vision for the SUAS commercial market MUST be MUCH BIGGER - because it's impact is much bigger. It will affect every single person in the United States.

Yes, I Believe that this is the equivelent of a good old fashioned Gold Rush. AND the good news is that EVERYONE has the GOLD - it's the air we breathe over our heads and not concentrated in the rural or metro area's or controlled by one group and that to me is revolutionary and holds tremendous promise for our country and shouldn't be diminished, marginalized or monopolized.

May 22, 2012

The purpose of the Otay Ranch Town Center flight was to provide unique viewing angles and vantage points for lightweight High Definition camera's while fly in high visibility / high profile / high traffic area's such as an outdoor shopping mall in Southern California.

While we were conducting this flight we learned about a pretty cool paintball facility...which we talk a little bit about in the video.

May 01, 2012

In a previous post titled "The Elephant in the Room" I described my emotional journey and a milestone event for me where in order to allow our company and product to continue to build momentum both in product maturity and accelerating momentum towards market acceptance and entry, I needed put my ego aside and be satisfied with the artistic and utilitarian nature of the MAKO product.

I think that fundamentally this is the manifistation of a philosophy I termed "Low Friction Innovaton", which has been a product design and development approach I have been developing and refining over 20 years of cumulative experiences as a special operations end user/practioner and SOF technologist. I'm learning that it's no longer theoretical or a fantasy - It works.

This has been difficult for me to describe to others and I accept that, for me, the best way for me to describe it to people is to simply demonstrate it.

MAKO is one of my fullest expressions (to date) of this design (and now product) philosophy.

Another incredibly subtle but very important attribute of this approach is that in the case of the MAKO system, in describing MAKO to people while in operation (or to people passing by) it is incredibly non-threatening and unobtrusive. Ironically, this was a key reason I struggled with describing MAKO to people because it wasn't "splashy" and didn't "jolt" or make someone do a double take. (Not counting very early prototypes that were - well - early prototypes...) It was at it's core an elegantly simple, high performance balloon flying on a string. Responses I've seen evoked have ranged from "wow, that's cool!' to "eh." to "so what?"

I get that now and am absolutely ok and centered with this. Because, frankly in everything I do, my ultimate goal is to deliver utilitarian art that has a positive impact. It's starting to happen. The visceral responses come when people see what they can do with the product.

An example is a brief video clip from some aerial imagery from MAKO on a quiet Sunday Morning in late spring in San Diego. This video clip has an audio recording of the sounds from MAKO while in flight.

Again, it's subtle - but when you watch the video, listen to the audio.

April 27, 2012

We're pretty excited to have been given permission to release images and video publicly of our association with Lockheed Martin Skunkworks to bring the Sofcoast's ASAP XP MAKO Hybrid Air System to market this year.

Starting off with a brief broadcast from The Pulse Network during the 2012 National Association of Broadcaster's Show in Las Vegas.

In this segment, Mr. Koonce from Lockheed Martin discusses a brief history of Skunkworks and then talks a little bit about the LM NAB exhibit. More to follow.

April 07, 2012

As a result of over 50 years as end user's/practioner's and over four years in the lab, the Sofcoast team is bringing it's vision for tactical information systems to market, starting with their pioneering work in defining a new category of tethered inflatable aerial platforms called Hybrid Air Systems. Hybrid Air Systems combine the most desirable features of Small Unmanned Aerial System's, aerostats (balloons on strings) and kites to deliver a superior product for man portable persistent fixed or mobile elevated platforms.

April 05, 2012

Just got the chance to share a couple of low res screen shots from raw video footage of our first product showcase video shoot of the MAKO product today. I'm not at liberty to share much more than this: MAKO will be unveiled as an aerial platform solution for an entire multi-billion dollar market in the coming weeks.

Stay Tuned.

Frankly, I was speechless for about an hour after actually seeing the aerial footage tonight at dinner. Obviously, we were all pretty optimistic about MAKO going into today. To put it mildly, by the end of the day, we were astounded.

January 21, 2012

Sofcoast is pioneering the development of a new category of flying system called a Hybrid Air System. Hybrid Air Systems combine the most desirable features of Small Unmanned Aerial System's, aerostats (balloons on strings) and kites to deliver a superior persistent fixed or mobile elevated platform.

Sofcoast's first Hybrid Air System, MAKO, gives a wide variety of end user's the ability to easily transport and elevate lightweight technologies to provide actionable information to support a broad range of activity based information related needs for various end user's. Many fielded aerostat systems range from large to extremely large, requiring large logistics support infrastructure including transporting large steel bottles of helium. The MAKO system is truly man-portable, and coupled with the right types of payloads, in this instance a developmental pan tilt zoom (PTZ) HD Color and High Resolution Thermal Imager (EO/IR), MAKO provides a quiet, easy to use, easy to deploy and inexpensive aerial coverage asset for a wide variety of use cases and customer's.

TIDES is a research project dedicated to open-source knowledge sharing to promote sustainable support to populations under severe stress—post-war, post-disaster, or impoverished, in foreign or domestic contexts, for short-term or long-term (multi-year) operations. The project provides reach-back "knowledge on demand" to decision-makers and those working in the field. It helps catalyze public-private, whole-of-government, and trans-national approaches to encourage unity of action among diverse organizations where there is no unity of command. TIDES maintains this website, where anyone in the project’s network (called STAR-TIDES) can publish their work for feedback and critique.

Also, I want to thank everyone who stopped by to express interest, give us words of encouragement or just to show their support, we greatly appreciate it.

December 13, 2010

Researchers have developed a camera system that snaps multi-gigabit images at 30 frames per second over 360 degrees and then displays them as one three dimensional panorama

Cameras that can shoot 3D images are nothing new, but they don't really capture three dimensional moments at all - they actually record images in stereoscopic format, using two 2D images to create the illusion of depth. These photos and videos certainly offer a departure from their conventional two dimensional counterparts, but if you shift your view point, the picture remains the same. Researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) hope to change all that with the development of a strange-looking camera that snaps 360 degrees of simultaneous images and then reconstructs the images in 3D.

The researchers have created two prototype models, both inspired by the multi-lens eyes of insects like the house fly. One has a lens head about the size of an orange and features over a hundred camera lenses - like the ones used in mobile phones - and the other about the size of a golf ball and sporting 15 lenses. Unlike the stereoscopic photographic or video cameras with a front facing lens setup, the prototypes are able to record images from all around them.

The lenses point out through a hemispherical frame and are positioned in such a way that each image captured overlaps slightly on its neighbors. Sophisticated algorithms built into a dedicated hardware platform then judge the actual distance between the camera and subjects in the frame and merges the many gigabits of photographic information captured at 30 frames per second into a 360 degree panorama.

"With this invention, we solved two major problems with traditional cameras," said Professor Pierre Vandergheynst. "The camera angle, which is no longer limited thanks to the camera's ability to film in 360 degrees and in real time; and the depth of field, which is no longer limiting thanks to the 3D reconstruction."

The researchers report that images are captured in real time and without distortion and that users can choose to snap a single shot from a particular lens or have them all work together to produce the 360 degree, three dimensional panorama.

The team's Professor Yusuf Leblebici said that the "work is likely to change the entire field of image acquisition, with a huge range of potential applications" including movie-making and immersive games design.

The project is a collaborative project between the EPFL's Signal Processing Laboratory - who authored the algorithms to calculate the distance between the camera and subjects and those tasked with assembling all of the images into one 360 degree panorama - and the Microelectronic Systems Laboratory - who developed the apparatus and took care of the processing needs.

In the following video, Vandergheynst gives a short explanation of the technology:

December 08, 2010

Early 2011 will see printed memory devices in toys and printed sensors in packages used to ship drugs.

By Katherine Bourzac

Inexpensive printed sensors, transistors, and memory devices that aren't as speedy or as high-capacity as silicon devices could enable the widespread use of sensors in places that aren't cost-effective today. Disposable devices could monitor and store information about the temperature of drugs, the safety of food during shipping, or air quality.

Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which is owned by Xerox, have been developing a suite of materials for making printed electronics, including sensors and transistors. This week at the Printed Electronics USA conference in Santa Clara, California, PARC announced details about two partnerships to develop products based on its research prototypes. PARC will work with Norwegian company Thin Film Electronics to make higher-capacity printed memory devices that incorporate the research center's printed transistors. And PARC is working with Soligie of Savage, Minnesota, to develop products based on its printed temperature sensors.

Much of the excitement around printed electronics has centered on the potential to replace silicon electronics in complex devices such as display screens so that they can roll up. For these types of applications, researchers are working to match silicon's performance in materials that are just as fast and efficient, but flexible and inexpensive.

These more sophisticated printed electronics may be a few years from commercialization. "We want to go to market in simpler applications to prove that printed electronics can work today," says Davor Sutija, CEO of Thin Film. The company's 20-bit printed memory devices will be in toys early next year.

Products integrating these postage-stamp-sized memory devices will include playing cards paired with online games. Kids will use the cards to transfer their playing history between a PC and a handheld device. For a toy or a game that requires only a small amount of memory, using silicon-based memory like flash is impossibly expensive. "When you're only storing a small amount of data in lots of places, the cost threshold is right for printed electronics that cost a few cents," Sutija says.

Thin Film's memory devices are made on long reels of plastic using roll-to-roll printing, the same basic process used to churn out newspapers. They sandwich a layer of electrically sensitive polymer between top and bottom layers of wire-like electrodes that are perpendicular to one another. Where the electrodes cross, it creates a charge-storage device called a capacitor. When a small voltage is applied to the capacitor, the orientation of the polymer in the capacitor changes; this change in orientation makes the "1" and the "0."

The current devices have a large footprint relative to their storage capacity. By increasing the storage density in collaboration with PARC, Thin Film hopes to make a printed memory product that can be integrated with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags for use in disposable packaging to store information about an individual item's history. Today, this requires silicon chips, which are too expensive to implement widely. However, cheaper devices could hold information about the history of, for example, individual bags of spinach, rather than about pallets that hold many boxes of bagged spinach. And more cell phones are expected to begin integrating near-field communications devices that will enable them to act as a contactless credit card and read ubiquitous RFID tags on things like bags of spinach.

To improve the storage density of the printed memory devices, Thin Film will integrate PARC's printed transistors. This will reduce the total number of electrical contact pads needed to read and write to the device. Sutija says the collaboration with PARC will lead to a 128-bit memory product that costs less than 10 cents.

Printed-electronics company Soligie is working with PARC to commercialize printed temperature sensors, or "thermistors," devices commonly found in air conditioners, ovens, and containers used to ship drugs. They're based on materials whose electrical resistance varies with temperature. To manufacture them usually requires baking ceramic materials at high temperatures to make a rigid wire-like structure. PARC has developed printable materials to make flexible thermistors that should be less expensive to make, says PARC's senior director of business development, John Knight.

The thermistors PARC will commercialize with Soligie will still need to be connected to a silicon chip to read out the temperature; down the line, the researchers expect to integrate them with all-printed circuits. The company will begin sending prototypes to customers early next year.

November 24, 2010

Found an incredible comment while I was reading an article about Gen Y unplugging cable tv, which is worth the read here.

"As a member of Generation Y, I am a prime example of this. I have no permanency in terms of physical ties to infrastructure. Our generation is transient. Most are taking advantage of our age to gain experiences through travel more than past generations because we are more globally focused and technology allows us flexibility to explore as we simultaneously stay connected. In a globalized economy, our Gen Y way of life will become the new reality." - Chelsea

According to Jeffrey Cole, generation Y's changing habits will continue to upset and disrupt plenty of media businesses with its unconventional consuming habits with the next big sector likely to cable and satellite television.

According to Cole's research, people in their 20s and younger no longer buy print newspapers, music CDs, land-line phones or watches. Cole has also pointed out that they're no longer signing up for cable, they’re simply watching video on laptops or even their cell phones.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

11.19.2010 By Staff Sgt. Nathaniel G. Johnson CAMP ADDER, Iraq – In response to threats against U.S. troops deployed to Iraq over the last eight years, the Army deploys small tethered blimps, or aerostats, equipped with surveillance equipment for force protection. As a result, the Army has had to train soldiers from a variety of military occupational specialties to operate this equipment.

Sgt. Anthony Palumbo, wheeled vehicle mechanic, of Sterling, Ill., 3rd STB, 3rd AAB, 4th Inf. Div., makes a minor repair to a bracket that is used to attach aircraft warning lights to the cable that anchors the aerostat. Courtesy Photo

Today, six soldiers of 3rd Special Troops Battalion, 3rd Advise and Assist Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, operate the aerostat as it hovers over Camp Adder in support of base defense. They provide surveillance data, enabling the protection of the U.S. and Iraqi forces on Camp Adder and the surrounding Iraqi bases and local villages.

“It’s a great asset because it’s similar to

a guard tower with a huge advantage. It’s a few hundred feet in the air giving us a much better view,” said Sgt. Michael Milsap, Bradley mechanic, from Abilene, Texas.

Without a designated military occupation specialty to maintain and operate the aerostat, this group of mechanics, fire supporters and communications specialists had to learn an entirely new skill set to keep it flying.

“It’s a very useful skill because it’s also used in the civilian world,” said Spc. James Williams, of Virginia Beach, Va., a fiber optics specialist, “It’s a skill I may be able to use later on.”

Once selected to operate the aerostat, the team attended a 28-day training course to learn the theories of lift and how the system works, said Milsap.

“From helium operations to launching the blimp, soldiers are evaluated in the classroom and hands-on exercises, to operate the system proficiently,” he said.

After two-weeks of classroom instruction, they took a written exam and then moved on to two-weeks of hands-on training that required them to learn launch and recover techniques.

“The training was really good because you learn a lot more when you train hands-on like we did for more than 14 days,”

According to Williams, some of the soldiers do get the opportunity to apply the skills learned in their chosen military occupational specialty.

“There’re two of us fiber optics specialists here,” he said, “so we are able to take care of most of the problems with the cables without calling the field support representative.”

Designed to carry communications and surveillance equipment, operating at altitudes of several hundred feet, the aerostat provides a bird’s-eye view across the area of responsibility.

To some, the aerostat is not only a great deterrent, but also a reassuring sight when it’s flying in the air. The team tries to keep it flying as often as possible, because it gives people on base a greater sense of security, said Sgt. Anthony Palumbo, wheeled vehicle mechanic, of Sterling, Ill.

The aerostat team has provided valuable data to the base defense operations center which uses the data to advise and assist Iraqi security forces in response to threats near Adder.

“The [base defense operations center] calls when they want us to look as something suspicious and we swing the camera in that direction. We provide a real-time surveillance feed so everyone sees what’s going on,” said Palumbo.

So-called "personal drones" mounted with cameras have already been used by police in crime fighting and photographers believe they could also be used to track stars.

Remote controlled flying devices about the size of pizza boxes are being developed by several companies and universities in the US and could be in use by the end of next year.

They are much smaller, simpler versions of the Predator drones used by the CIA to fire missiles in Afghanistan.

Ken Rinaldo, an associate professor at Ohio State University, is working on the "Paparazzi Drone." At the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada earlier this year he deployed "Paparazzi Bots," human-sized robots which followed athletes and spectators and took photographs of them.

However, it does not have rules prohibiting the flying of mini-drones for recreational purposes, and only advises that such aircraft be flown at low altitude and away from airports.

The FAA said if paparazzi began using the drones the "primary concern with that would be safety issues." Supporters of the idea suggest that stars could benefit because they would no longer be followed by photographers in cars. However, lawyers suggested celebrities would fight any use of drones on privacy grounds.

Other potential uses include accompanying soldiers on the battlefield, as search and rescue tools following natural disasters, for parents to check on children, or even for suspicious husbands and wives to track their spouses.

In February it was disclosed that Merseyside Police in the UK had used a £40,000 drone called the "Air Robot" to successfully track a suspected car thief and arrest him.

Among other things, the BBN radios include software that helps soldiers automatically locate data and information on a network. In the AWNS project, DARPA wants to use that capability as the basis for a soldier information system in which the radios would work as computers linked in a wireless environment.

Bernie Skoch, a communications consultant and retired Air Force general with extensive experience in communications, said the idea makes sense because "the distinction between radios and computers no longer exists." Today's software-based radios -- such as those under development for the military's Joint Tactical Radio System -- also are computers, Skoch said.

DARPA, in a broad agency announcement for the AWNS program, said it is seeking proposals from industry on how to tap into the networked computer resources of nine Wirelesses Network after Next radios.

The agency also wants industry's help in adapting the multiple antenna technology used in the latest standard of consumer Wi-Fi, 802.11n, to advanced radios. This multiple-input and multiple-outputtechnology helps capture weak signals, and Skoch said it is well suited for use in urban environments where traditional antennas cannot always receive signals.

The MIMO antenna DARPA wants to use in its next generation radios and networks will differ significantly from traditional vertical metal antennas. The agency said it needs help in developing antennas that would be distributed around the uniform of the soldier. Skoch said they might be built into patches that could be attached, for example, to a shoulder pad.

While traditional military radios work on selected frequencies, DARPA said it wants to develop a software-based "strategic reasoner" that will help the radios select the best frequency for a given location.

McCarthy said that later this year he plans to test tactical cellular gear from Sirran Communications at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. He also plans to test cellular systems from XG Technology Inc. that can seek out and operate on unused frequencies.

McCarthy said he is working closely with DARPA on the AWNS project and noted that development of advanced battlefield systems has the strong backing of Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff.

September 21, 2010

Soldiers show some ingenuity during tests of next-generation radios

White Sands Missile Range, N.M. -- Contractors might have developed the advanced battlefield communications systems the Army is testing here, but it was soldiers who adapted the technology to fit requirements only a warrior on the front lines would know, the kind of ingenuity that harkens back to the Civil War.

This month, soldiers are testing the new Rifleman Radio, an advanced handheld, software-based device the service believes will provide a generational leap in the way troops communicate on the battlefield. The radio, part of the Joint Tactical Radio System program, has been built for the data-rich environment that soldiers now operate in and is designed to send and receive data-rich images and to provide different ways to communicate, including chat room-like venues, to quickly exchange intelligence.

So far during the two week, $12 million exercise that is scheduled to finish Sept. 28, soldiers had to devise a workaround to some of the inherent shortcomings of Rifleman Radio. For example, the extent of its reception is only about 3 miles. That range isn't enough to cover the 350 square miles that make up the exercise area inside White Sand's sprawling 3,200-square-mile base, which runs from north of El Paso, Texas, to south of Socorro, N.M.

To boost coverage, soldiers applied the simple rule that the higher an antenna, the longer its range, and they hung one of the devices from a blimp, or aerostat, and sent it up several thousand feet so it hovered over the exercise area, said Maj. Bill Venable, assistant project manager for the infantry brigade combat team in the Army's Program Executive Office for Integration.

The radio-loaded aerostat served as a relay station to extend coverage to almost 25 miles, a solution that is similar to how the Army Signal Corps increased its range of sight during the Civil War by sending observers up in balloons.

In addition, the Army didn't need a lot of high-priced integration to develop the ad hoc relay. "We just tied it onto the aerostat," Venable said.

This year's exercise is more realistic than past tests, and attempts to mimic operations in Afghanistan by featuring two mock villages that soldiers populate. The systems the Army is testing tie together troops patrolling the villages on foot and those riding mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles farther away.

The exercise, which the Army calls a limit user test, amounts to a pass-fail experiment for the JTRS ground mobile radio, developed by Boeing and its companion network integration kit, which is intended to provide the Army with a battlefield mobile network capable of moving data at high speed.

The Army originally designed the network to support communications between various new combat vehicles, and motion and optical sensors that were being developed under its $160 billion Future Combat Systems program. Defense Secretary Robert Gates canceled the program in April 2009. That left the service with a network designed primarily to transmit sensor data, but Pinnell said feedback from soldiers participating in tests has changed the way the Army plans to use system.

The Army has reconfigured the network to push all kinds of broadband data, such as satellite imagery down to small, company-level units, that lacks wideband connections.

The system includes computer terminals mounted in MRAPs, which allow young, keyboard-savvy soldiers to conduct and manage operations in Internet-type chat rooms, which, Pinnell said, "they much prefer to talking over the radio."

Sgt. Michael Gimble, a scout team leader with the brigade, demonstrated his keyboard virtuosity by popping open a window to select an image, clicking on a chat room icon and sending the image to another soldier, who quickly acknowledged he received the file.

The new systems require soldiers already overburdened by body armor and packs to carry extra weight, which Spec. 4th Class Joel Eninger [spelling right?] found daunting. Eninger spent a day hauling tactical unmanned ground sensors and their batteries to the top of a steep, nearly 900-foot hill. Taking a brick-like battery from his pack, he wondered when the Army would come up with lighter batteries to ease his load.

Although the Army has great hopes for the wideband ground mobile radio and the network integration kit, Staff Sgt. Patrick Harmon said the two pieces of gear still need some work. The ground mobile radio takes a long time to connect to the network and the integration kit frequently crashes, he said.

Col. Steve Duke, who works with the Army Test and Evaluation Command's Operational Test Command's Maneuver Test Directorate, said that feedback is what the Army needs its soldiers to provide during the exercise. Soldiers should report if the new gear is effective, suitable and survivable in combat.

[0]wooferhound writes "A portable laser [1]backpack for 3D mapping has
been developed at the University of California, Berkeley, where it is
being hailed as a breakthrough technology capable of producing fast,
automatic and realistic 3D mapping of difficult interior environments.
... The backpack is the first of a series of similar systems to work
without being strapped to a robot or attached to a cart. At the same
time, its data acquisition speed is very fast, as it collects the data
while the human operator is walking; this is in contrast with existing
systems in which the data is painstakingly collected in a stop-and-go
fashion, resulting in days and weeks of data acquisition time. It
utilizes novel sensor fusion algorithms that use cameras, lasers range
finders and inertial measurement units to generate a textured,
photo-realistic, 3D model that can operate without GPS input and that is
a big challenge."

June 10, 2010

(PhysOrg.com)
-- A wind-powered car has been clocked in the US traveling down wind
faster than the wind. In a recent run at New Jerusalem in Tracy,
California, the car reached a top speed of more than 2.85 times faster
than the wind blowing at the time (13.5 mph) powered by the wind
itself. The run should now settle the DWFTTW (down wind faster than the
wind) debate that has been raging for some time on the Internet about
whether or not such a feat was possible.

The
Thin Air Designs car, called the Blackbird, was built by Rick
Cavallaro, an aerodynamicist, paraglider and kitesurfer, who was
alerted to the DWFTTW debate by his employer at Sportvision Inc., Stan
Honey, a world-class sailing navigator. Cavallaro is chief scientist
with the company. He made some calculations that convinced him the feat
was possible and then built a model to prove it. When skeptics remained
unconvinced, Cavallaro and a friend decided to build a full-size
version.

The “Faster than the Wind” team was able to attract sponsorship from
wind turbine company Joby Energy and Google, and worked in
collaboration with the aero department of the San Jose State University
to build their ultra-light vehicle, which is made largely of foam. The
car has a passing resemblance to a Formula 1 racing car, except for the five meter high propeller
mounted on the back, and it is this propeller that holds the key to how
it is possible for the car to travel down wind faster than the wind. An
earlier version known as the BUFC for Big Ugly Cart (fill in the
blank), also achieved speeds greater than the down wind speed at the
North American Land Sailing Association (NALSA) meeting on a dry
lakebed in Nevada in March.

Cavallaro
explained the car is able to move faster than the wind because the
propeller is not turned by the wind. The wind pushes the vehicle
forward, and once moving the wheels turn the propeller. The propeller
spins in the opposite direction to that expected, pushing the wind backwards, which in turn pushes the car forwards, turning the wheels, and thus turning the propeller faster still.

The vehicle was built after over a year of trials. Building a
transmission able to transfer power from the wheels to the propeller
was the most difficult part of the design. The next stage in
development will be to have trials confirmed by NALSA.

June 09, 2010

As a founder and CEO of a new company building new products for an "emerging" expeditionary enterprise user market, I've grown to love the "children's book" The Little Prince, by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. My favorite quote comes after the author describes a book he read about the Jungle called True Stories. He shows a picture of a boa constrictor swallowing a "wild beast". (Here's an online version of the book.)

One of the most interesting points about this story is in the second chapter when the narrator meets The Little Prince in the Sahara desert after his emergency landing leaves him stranded with a pretty uncertain future.

The Prince asks the narrator to draw him a sheep and after repeated unsuccessful attempts to draw the sheep to the specific satisfaction of the Prince, the narrator draws a box and explains that "This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside." (The Prince got very excited and was tickled about this. He imagined what the sheep might look or be like - and obviously the Prince liked his vision of the sheep in the box more than the narrator's drawings..)

Sure patterns of human behavior and the tools we use are changing - but the fundamentals are the same.

By definition, scarcity is everywhere abundance isn't.

The idea behind Sofcoast is simply to focus on applying tech to target the abundant scarcity problem set as it pertains to information and communications. Unfortunately with all of the stuff happening in the world today, it's getting easier for the average person to get a whiff of what might happen when "scarcity" hits and escalates. (some examples...)

Scarcity of information.

Scarcity of communications.

Scarcity of safety.

Scarcity of money.

Scarcity of food.

Scarcity of energy.

Scarcity of freedom.

Now think about the technology we take for granted, like being able to pick up your mobile phone and dial a number and someone answers on the other end...or better yet, you pick up your iPhone which has a full battery and great cellular or wifi reception and download that app to entertain yourself - it just works.

That's abundance.

Now...think about the time where you couldn't make that phone call or couldn't download that app. (your battery died, you couldn't get access to a network, your service was shut down because you didn't pay your bill...wait that was me....) all of these are examples of scarcity.

Now...imagine that you needed to use your mobile device for something more than ordering takeout or playing a game - imagine that you were a first responder responding in a crisis such as a hurricane, a flood, an earthquake, a search and rescue event.

Scarcity happens quickly and when it does people can and do suddenly find themselves in "abundant scarcity" mode. Meaning those individuals (and organizations) must be able to effectively cope in order to survive. We consider groups of people who are responsible for responding during these types of situations to be "expeditionary enterprise users".

The military is great at organizing, synchronizing and operating in expeditionary mode or "abundant scarcity" mode. They've spent eons and gazillions of dollars figuring out how to cope with scarcity.

Consumer tech is advancing at warp speed tantalizing us all with tech that allows us to exploit abundant network and bandwidth availability, processor power and energy.

What about those folks in between magical consumer gizmo's that "just work" and are powered by "freemium" business models and the military tech that, if it isn't classified, is ridiculously pricey or hard to (acquire|operate|integrate|manage|support|maintain).

As Deepwater
Horizon enters into its seventh week, one can’t help having a bit of the
‘I’m stuck in a bad episode of the Twilight Zone’ feeling.

First, the problem seems unending. No
high tech magic wands. No victory laps. Rather, we’ve witnessed a series of
techno-flops. Top kill, robots, container domes, riser insertion tubes, and now
back to more robots. A definitive remedy, we’re told, can’t be in place until
August. Hmm let’s see 5,000 (or is it 100,000) barrels per day times another 45
(or is it 60 or 90) days. Only one thing seems for sure. We’re talking a mighty
big number.

Deepwater
highlights how far we have to go in terms of practicing innovation on the fly
in relation to important and emerging agendas.

And that’s the second striking feature
of Deepwater: the mushiness of the data and the conflicting positions that
result from it. Leak
volume is only one example. Opinions also vary on environmental impact,
costs, and on policy remedies that are now needed. We are now in the realm of
challenges that defy simple technological solutions or orderly chains of
command. It’s business Rashomon now, since how we define the problem (profits,
environmental and economic impact, academic truth, regulatory oversight)
determines what we think should be done.

This takes us to the third aspect of
Deepwater, the ‘could have been’s’ that emerge as we walk the cat back. If only
BP had better
safety procedures, or had questioned the well’s stability earlier or had
used a more conservative remedy in the first place. If only the federal
government had stepped
in sooner. If only our policies with regard to regulation
of oil companies and offshore drilling had been more strict. If only we had
brought other expert opinion in at the outset to work the problem.

Welcome to the world of wicked
problems.

I touched
on this topic recently in relation to the UK elections, but it is worth
expanding on in relation to Deepwater. Almost 40 years ago, the social
scientist Horst Rittel proposed the term “wicked problems” as a way of trying
to understand why some challenges were intractable and highly difficult to deal
with. Wicked problems shared certain characteristics, in his view. First, they
were hard to define. (Is Deepwater an issue of technology, safety, policy, or
environmental policy? Yes.) Second, they involved many different and hard to
reconcile perspectives? (For sure, in this case.) Third, solutions weren’t true
or false, but better or worse, and hard to test in advance. (Yep.) And fourth,
the resut is a brace of conflicting opinions. (Definitely.)

So there may be an important, teachable
element to the Deepwater story. While we would have all preferred a
straightforward technological success story (top kill worked and it’s Miller
time), the failure goes much further. It’s about how we look at our
preparedness to address complex challenges and how we might deal with them
better in the future. Because we are in an era of wicked problems, folks, and
something like this, sadly, is bound to happen again. And again.

How do you deal with wicked problems?
The key for Rittel was bringing a highly creative process to bear and
collecting all stakeholders and viewpoints under one roof to engage in the
work. He felt it important not to give in to the temptation to simplify, but
rather to examine the challenge in all its complexity. Some of this is
reflected in our president’s recent statement, We will take ideas from
anywhere. That’s crucially important, but success is not just about ideas – it’s
what you do with them to make them happen and when, as well as how you use the
convening power of government to create blended solutions and fast
synchronization among divergent parties.

Where can we find some best or at least
promising practices? Certainly the military is in the wicked problems business.
And in that culture, you find situation rooms, sophisticated approaches to
command and control, experience in crisis management, mental rehearsal and
training to think the unthinkable, and investment in leadership development.
But comparable capabilities still seem lacking for the kind of societal
disaster that is Deepwater. And they are desperately needed to generate the
kind of divergent thinking appropriate to wicked problems. In the Deepwater
story, it took a long while for academic expertise to be allowed into the tent
and for the full weight of government expertise to make itself known once we
had resolved a few little problems in the Minerals
Management Service.

Info

So we need to know a lot more about how
to do the work of innovation in order to address the kind of wicked problems
that threaten the common good. In short, we need to design a new kind of
innovative and fast capability in government that is also capable of blending
in the perspectives of the private and NGO sectors as well as academic experts
and civil society.

I have been saying for years that our
government needs to get better at innovation. Deepwater highlights how far we
have to go in terms of practicing innovation on the fly in relation to
important and emerging agendas. We are still stuck in a government narrative
that looks at innovation as being about cool, high-tech ideas, people in white
lab coats or economic inputs within broad development policies. Well yes, but
innovation is also about coming up with innovative solutions to wicked problems
at the tempo of life. It’s about how senior people come together to figure out
new solutions in a crisis to get us to where we want to go.

We need, I believe, a new kind of
innovation rapid response capability that employs the state of the art in
facilitation, communication and collaboration technology to generate speed and
alignment. We need a new approach to cultivating facilitation skills that will
enhance the work of stakeholder groups and allow the generation of rapid
alignment among differing points of view. We need better tools for
visualization and problem solving to create shared understanding. In short, we
need a new kind of innovation SWAT capability with a seat at the table of
power. I’ve even gone so far as to suggest during the last presidential
campaign that every federal department have a senior facilitation team as part
of a national facilitation corps that is prepared to deal with unexpected
emergencies.

If we don’t do something like this, I
fear that the history of our future will be written in terms of a series of
wicked problems that turned out to be a lot more wicked than they could have
been.

Dubbed
"Mr. Creativity" by The Economist, John Kao is a contributing editor
at The Daily Beast and an adviser to both public and private sector leaders. He
is chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, whose i20 group is an
association of national innovation "czars." He wrote Jamming:
The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, a BusinessWeek bestseller,
and Innovation
Nation. He is also a Tony-nominated producer of film and stage.

June 06, 2010

WASHINGTON — A senior United Nations official said on Wednesday that
the growing use of armed drones by the United States to kill terrorism
suspects was undermining global constraints on the use of military force. He
warned that the American example would lead to a chaotic world as the new
weapons technology inevitably spread.

In a 29-page report to the United Nations Human Rights
Council, the official, Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative
on extrajudicial executions, called on the United States to exercise greater
restraint in its use of drones in places like Pakistan and Yemen, outside the
war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The report — the most extensive effort
by the United Nations to grapple with the legal implications of armed drones —
also proposed a summit meeting of “key military powers” to clarify legal limits
on such killings.

In an interview, Mr. Alston said the
United States appeared to think that it was “facing a unique threat from
transnational terrorist networks” that justified its effort to put forward
legal justifications that would make the rules “as flexible as possible.”

But that example, he said, could
quickly lead to a situation in which dozens of countries carry out “competing
drone attacks” outside their borders against people “labeled as terrorists by
one group or another.”

“I’m particularly concerned that the
United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding
entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe,” Mr. Alston said
in an accompanying statement. “But this strongly
asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an
entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing
grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent
extrajudicial executions.”

Mr. Alston is scheduled to present his
findings to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday. While not legally
binding, his report escalates the volume of international concerns over a tactic
that has become the Obama administration’s weapon of choice against Al Qaeda and its allies.

The New York Times reported last week that Mr. Alston’s report would
call on the United States to stop using Central Intelligence Agency-operated drones and
limit the technology to regular military forces because they are open and
publicly accountable for their conduct — for example, by investigating missile
strikes that kill civilians.

Days later, news emerged that a C.I.A. drone strike in
Pakistan’s tribal areas was believed to have killed Al Qaeda’s third-ranking
leader, apparently a major success. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Alston
acknowledged that the United States could make “a reasonable legal argument”
that a strike against such a figure in those circumstances was lawful and
appropriate, but he argued that the escalating number of drone strikes in
Pakistan still raised concerns.

The recent strike “is a very convenient
one because there you have got a very clearly acceptable target, but we’re not
told who the other strikes are against and what efforts are being made to
comply with the rules,” he said.

The report calls on nations like
Pakistan to publicly disclose the scope and limits of any permission granted
for drone strikes on their territories. It also calls on drone operators like
the United States to disclose the legal justification for such killings, the
criteria and safeguards used when selecting targets, and the process for
investigating attacks that kill civilians.

A White House spokesman declined to
comment on the report, but pointed to a speech in March by the State Department legal
adviser, Harold Koh, that partly outlined the Obama administration’s legal
rationale. Mr. Koh said the United States obeyed legal limits on the use of
force when selecting targets, and he defended drone killings as lawful because
of the armed conflict with Al Qaeda and because of the nation’s right to
self-defense.

“A state that is engaged in an armed
conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with
legal process before the state may use lethal force,” he said. “Our procedures
and practices for identifying lawful targets are extremely robust, and advanced
technologies have helped to make our targeting even more precise.”

The United Nations report agrees that
drone killings can be lawful in battlefield combat. But it says that the United
States is stretching the limits of who can be lawful targets.

For example, it criticized the United
States for singling out drug lords in Afghanistan suspected of giving money to
the Taliban, a policy it said was contrary to the
traditional understanding of the laws of war. Similarly, it said, terrorism
financiers, propagandists and others who are not fighters should face criminal
prosecution, not summary killing.

It also said that a targeted killing
outside of an armed conflict “is almost never likely to be legal.” In
particular, it rejected “pre-emptive self-defense” as a justification for
killing terrorism suspects far from combat zones.

“This expansive and open-ended
interpretation of the right to self-defense goes a long way towards destroying
the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the U.N. Charter,” Mr. Alston said. “If invoked by
other states, in pursuit of those they deem to be terrorists and to have
attacked them, it would cause chaos.”

But a United States official, speaking
anonymously because of the sensitivity of the issue, said drone attacks had
been an “effective, exact and essential” tactic for reaching militants in
inaccessible areas of Pakistan, whose government does not want the United
States military fighting in its territory.

“The United States has an inherent
right to protect itself and will not refrain from doing so based on someone
else’s exceptionally narrow — if not faulty — definition of self-defense,” the
official said. The report noted that Russia and Israel had also claimed a right
in recent years to single out people they deemed terrorism suspects, and Mr.
Alston said 40 other countries already had drone technology — with several
already seeking armed versions.

Warning that the technology is making
targeted killings much easier and more frequent, the report urged major
military nations to meet with human rights specialists to work out agreements
on murky legal issues, such as when a farmer who sets roadside bombs at night
may be a target.

The report also raised concerns that
drone operators might not have the same respect for the laws of war as soldiers
in the field who have “been subjected to the risks and rigors of battle.”

“Because operators are based thousands
of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through
computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a
‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing,” it said.

Last week, the military released a report faulting military drone operators for
“inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting that led to an airstrike in February
that killed 23 Afghan civilians, including women and children.

Airships
are making more hot news than hot air these days, but whether their
bouyancy can be maintained when the war cools down remains to be seen.

The
biggest news is just around the corner - the selection of either
Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman to build the US Army's Long
Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) demonstrator. LEMV is a
unmanned hybrid airship designed to stay aloft for at least three weeks
at 20,000ft carrying a 2,500lb-payload of sensors and radios. A hybrid
airship combines aerodynamic, bouyant and propulsive lift.

But while we wait for the LEMV downselect, E-Green Technologies
has entertained us with the first inflation of its 235ft-long,
65ft-diameter Bullet 580 airship - in a sports stadium in Alabama.

Video: Youtube

The
Bullet 580 is designed to carry payloads up to 2,000lb to 20,000ft.
First flight is planned for later this year, carrying a payload to
measure the moisture content in soil. The LEMV will be bigger, around
300ft long, and has to be ready to deploy operationally to Afghanistan
18 months after contract award.

Northrop Grumman has teamed with the UK's Hybrid Air Vehicles
(HAV), custodian of the Airship Industries' heritage. HAV would be
responsible for the LEMV air vehicle, and has already flown a sub-scale
model of its design. Lockheed's Skunk Works flew an experimental hybrid
airship, the P-791, in 2006, while its Akron unit is building a
high-altitude, long-endurance airship demonstrator as well as
tethered-aerostat surveillance systems.

Raytheon, meanwhile, is
conducting flight tests of two large tethered aerostats at Dugway
Proving Ground in Utah as it develops the US Army's Joint Land Attack
Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS) system. The
aerostats are designed to stay aloft at 10,000-15,000ft for 30 days,
one carrying a surveiilance radar, the other a target tracking and
illumination radar.

Under the cover of the Atlas 5's payload shroud, the
X-37B is scheduled for launch at 7:52 p.m. EDT (2352 GMT) from Complex
41 at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The launch window extends for 9 minutes.

The 196-foot-tall booster rolled to the launch pad Wednesday morning.

"Fundamentally, this is an updated version of the space
shuttle," said Gary Payton, the U.S. Air Force's top civilian leader
for military space programs. "The Air Force has a suite of military
missions in space. This new vehicle could potentially help us do those
missions better."

Although officials are openly discussing the X-37B platform
itself, the Air Force is mum on exactly what payloads the unmanned ship
carries inside its cargo hold, which is about the size of a pickup
truck bed.

During several weeks or months in orbit, the X-37B will be a testbed for secret new technologies.

Future flights of the reusable spaceship could approach U.S. or
foreign satellites, recover old spacecraft, or test out surveillance
and repair techniques. The speculation leads some to voice concerns
over the militarization of space.

During a teleconference with reporters Tuesday, Payton said
none of those activities are part of the X-37B's first flight. The
craft launching Thursday does not carry a robot arm like the shuttle,
and there are no rendezvous objectives planned for the mission,
according to Payton.

New heat shield technologies, advanced guidance and navigation,
a solar power generation system, and new flight control systems are at
the top of the list of public goals for the test flight.

"The primary objectives of the X-37 are to [prove] a new batch
of vehicle technologies for America's future, plus readying and
demonstratring the concept of operations for reusable experimental
payloads," Payton said.

The X-37B will return to Earth only after it completes its top secret experiments in orbit.

A mini-space shuttle

With wings and a payload bay, the spaceplane has been labeled as
a miniature military space shuttle. But it is not equipped to carry
people and its capabilities are significantly more limited than the
real thing.

The X-37B spaceplane undergoes pre-launch processing near its Florida launch site. Credit: U.S. Air Force

It can only carry several hundred kilograms of useful payload mass to orbit, Payton said.

The X-37B, also named the Orbital Test Vehicle, is about one-quarter the size of a space shuttle orbiter.

The 11,000-pound spacecraft measures more than 29 feet long and
9.5 feet tall. Its wings span nearly 15 feet, according to the Air
Force.

Instead of running on fuel cells like the shuttle, the OTV will
unfurl a small solar array to produce electricity in orbit. And the
X-37B uses electromechanical actuators instead of hydraulics to move
its flight control surfaces.

The solar array gives the vehicle a renewable energy source,
permitting the X-37B to loiter in orbit for much longer than the space
shuttle, which is limited to missions lasting a few weeks.

Other technologies the OTV flight will test include advanced
guidance, navigation and control, thermal protection systems, avionics,
high temperature structures and seals, and conformal reusable
insulations, according to an Air Force fact sheet.

Built by the Boeing Phantom Works division, the X-37B's
on-board rocket propulsion system is nearly the size of the shuttle's
primary orbit-changing engine, giving the spaceplane powerful
capabilities to maneuver once in orbit.

The mission will be controlled by the Air Force's 3rd Space Experimentation Squadron at Schriever Air Force Base, Colo.

The Air Force says the craft's activities in space are
classified, including its post-launch orbital parameters. The X-37B is
designed to operate at altitudes between 110 and 500 nautical miles, or
126 to 575 miles, according to an Air Force spokesperson.

Thursday's Atlas launch will enter a news blackout after the
rocket's Centaur upper stage completes its first burn about 17 minutes
after liftoff. Any subsequent Centaur firings and deployment of the
X-37B will not be announced.

"You can't hide a space launch," Payton said. "The main thing
we want to emphasize is the vehicle itself, not so much what's going on
during the on-orbit experimental phase. The vehicle itself is the piece
of news here."

This artist's concept was produced when the X-37 was managed by NASA. Credit: Boeing

The length of the mission has not been determined, according to Payton. The craft can stay in orbit for up to 270 days.

At the end of the flight, the craft's main engine will fire to
drop the ship from orbit. The spaceplane will re-enter the atmosphere
on a computer-controlled autopilot and make a high-speed landing at
nearly 300 mph on a 15,000-foot-long runway at Vandenberg Air Force
Base, Calif.

"Our re-entry activity is slightly different than the shuttle
because the real-time human control won't be there every single
instance of de-orbit preps and de-orbit burn and entry," Payton said.
"It will be relying on its own autopilot, its own gyroscopes, its own
GPS receivers, eventually its own altimeter. It will be on its own all
the way through entry and landing. And that's dramatically different
than the way shuttle does it."

Transforming military space operations

The Air Force is building another X-37B vehicle for launch next
year. Its final launch date will depend on the outcome of the first
flight.

After landing, engineers will prepare the vehicles for more missions.

"The most important demonstration is on the ground," Payton
said. "Once we get the bird back, we'll see what it really takes to
turn this bird around and get it ready to go fly again, to learn how to
do payload changeout on the ground, to learn how much it really costs
to do this turnaround on the ground with these new technologies on the
X-37 itself."

The Air Force hopes turnaround times and operations expenses prove faster and less costly than traditional space platforms.

"There is much to learn in the first few flights on the
technologies used on this vehicle, how quickly it can be readied for a
re-flight, and on the operational utility," said David Hamilton,
director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. "We have started
discussions with Air Force Space Command (officials) to plan for the
possibility for transition to an operational capability, but the system
first must prove its utility and cost effectiveness during the test
program."

The program's future hinges on the outcome of test flights in 2010 and 2011.

"That all depends on the success of these first two birds,"
Payton said. "Can we keep the [operations and maintenance] costs low?
Can we turn them around between flights easily?"

The X-37B spacecraft is encapsulated inside the Atlas 5 rocket's payload fairing. Credit: U.S. Air Force

The X-37B could bridge the divide between expensive and
risky space systems and high-performance aircraft like the SR-71 spy
plane.

"The OTV has the potential to revolutionize how the Air Force
operates in space by making space operations more aircraft like and
adding in the capability for returnable plug-and-play experiments,"
Hamilton said in an Air Force news article on the mission.

"If we were talking a surge of small satellites, I would like
to see this X-37 handled much more like an airplane, maybe an SR-71,"
Payton said. "I would think handling this bird more like an SR-71 and
less like a routine space launch vehicle would be a good objective.
That's measured in several days, or maybe 10 or 15 days (between
flights)."

Any funding for further X-37B development is classified.

The Pentagon's Operationally Responsive Space program, which is
tasked with cutting space development times and costs, could be a good
fit for a potential fleet of spaceplanes, Payton said in a March
interview.

"We could have an X-37 sitting at Vandenberg or at the Cape,
and on comparitively short notice, depending on warfighter
requirements, we could put a specific payload into the payload bay,
launch it up on an Atlas or Delta, and then have it stay in orbit, do
the job for the combatant commander, and come back home," Payton said.
"And then the next flight, we could have a different payload inside,
maybe even for a different combatant commander."

Even if the X-37B demonstrates its readiness for operational
missions on short notice, the availability of launch vehicles will
likely impede quick re-flights.

The spaceplane can only launch on Atlas and Delta rockets, and their manifests are already full of military and NASA flights.

Long road to launch

This isn't the first time the Air Force has dabbled in reusable
space technologies. But the flight is occurring as NASA retires its own
reusable spaceship and turns its focus to commercial providers and
expendable one-flight systems.

The craft is the manifestation of the Air Force's long-held, on-and-off again dream to operate its own space plane.

The first time the military flirted with the idea of a reusable
spaceship was the Dyna-Soar project of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The Dyna-Soar, also named the X-20, was envisioned as a piloted
spacecraft for anti-satellite, reconnaissance and other space weapons
applications.

After Dyna-Soar's cancellation in 1963, the Air Force turned
its attention to an ill-fated manned space station called the Manned
Orbiting Laboratory. It was cancelled in 1969.

The military contributed to the earliest conceptual designs of
the space shuttle beginning in 1971. The Air Force selected Vandenberg
to host shuttle launches on polar orbit missions with classified
national security payloads.

But the Pentagon scrubbed plans to launch the shuttle from
Vandenberg after the Challenger accident. The military's last dedicated
shuttle mission launched from Florida in 1992.

The Air Force took over the X-37B program in 2006 from the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military's research and
development department.

The X-37's origins can be traced to NASA.

An atmospheric flight version of the X-37 was developed for landing tests. Credit: Boeing

"We were focused on keeping as much commonality to the prior work that
NASA and DARPA had done and just assembling this vehicle and sending it
through the vigorous environments so we had confidence that it would
work," Payton said.

NASA selected Boeing to develop the X-37 in 1999 as a testbed
for reusable launch vehicle technologies. The X-37 was later described
as a demonstrator for NASA's Space Launch Initiative and Orbital Space
Plane projects seeking less expensive and more reliable access to low
Earth orbit.

After funding dried up, NASA transferred the program to DARPA in 2004.

"The primary reason for selecting X-37 was the need to have a
demonstrator for thermal protection systems and re-entry systems," said
Dan Dumbacher, NASA's former X-37 project manager. "We can do arcjet
testing and other things on the ground, but you never get the right
environment until you actually fly stuff back from orbit. The reason
NASA stayed [with the X-37] as long as they did was because of the
thermal protection system technology demonstration aspect."

NASA still works with the Air Force on the spacecraft's
advanced silica thermal protection tiles and autonomous guidance
system, according to Dumbacher.

"This is pretty exciting time for me, personally," Payton said.
"After a tumultuous history of sponsorship, it's great to see the X-37
finally get to the launch pad and get into space."

The project's management is now concentrated in the highest
levels of the Air Force under the Rapid Capabilities Office, which
oversees new technological developments on the fast track for
introduction into operational roles.